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There’s good news for those of you who need to destroy your data stored on your SSD’s quickly and efficiently in an emergency situation. RunCore (manufacturer of SSD’s) has unveiled their new line of InVincible Solid State Disc drives which feature two ways to ensure data destruction.

The first capability the drives feature is ‘Intelligent’ destruction which over-writes the data and returns the drive back to its factory default setting. According to the company there is no possible way to recover the original data stored on the drive once the drive is reset. This is the rather mundane approach as the second option for data elimination is much more fun and effective (as well as costly).

The second option of data deletion the drives feature is self-destruction. Essentially the drive over-volts itself and physically damages the NAND chips inside rendering the drive useless (like a bad CPU overclocking job). To initiate both data erasure and destruction, the InVincible drives feature a two push-button system that is physically attached to the drive with the green button for erasing and a red button for meltdown.

These new drives were designed for the military, as well as other companies and institutions where sensitive data is being used or stored, and come in varying sizes and capacities that can withstand a temperature range of -45 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The company hasn’t said when the InVincible line of will be available or how much they will go for, but chances are they will cost more than current SSD’s and be available before the year is out.

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I had the opportunity last week to talk to Dr. Xudong Wang from the University of Wisconsin about his research into energy harvesting using nanfibers.  By coincidence this came just a week after I talked to Dr. Krupenkin about his energy harvesting technology.  They are similar in that they generate energy using the electrostatic force to move current rather than by moving a wire through a magnetic field as in a traditional generator.

Nanofiber energy harvesting uses materials that develop a charge when mechanical compression deforms their crystalline structure.  This happens in materials made of atoms with a high disparity of charge.  The compression causes one side of the material to have more atoms of a positive charge while the other side has more negatively charged atoms.  PVDF is common material with this property.  It can develop several volts when compressed.

Dr. Wang is researching ZnO because it can be grown into nanofibers and it is not toxic to the human body, so it may therefore lend itself to powering medical implants.  Nanofibers can be located in an assembly in which wires or other nanofibers brush against them, causing them to develop a charge.  This charge can be collected and stored in a battery or capacitor. 

The ZnO nanofibers typically only develop hundreds of millivolts, which makes it harder to harness than energy from PVDF.  How to collect charge efficiently from low-voltage sources is outside Dr. Wang's focus.

The energy from airflow can be harvested from a thin film using this property by allowing the film to oscillate in the wind.  This has been demonstrated with PVDF.  If researchers can make this work with very thin films using nanotechnology, tiny amounts of power could be harvested from the airflow associated with respiration.  It would be good to see a productive use for a phenomenon that has become a metaphor for general engineering failure owing to the case of Galloping Gertie.   

This technology touches me personally because my mother-in-law has a pacemaker.  Her doctors are monitoring its battery's charge.  Replacing the battery requires surgery, which can always be risky in people with health problems.  So deciding at which point to change the battery becomes tricky decision.  One application Dr. Wang talked about was pacemakers.  The heart undergoes a lot of motion from which energy could be harvested.  If this technology could provide even some of the power for a pacemaker, it would be a huge benefit to patients. 

As with all energy harvesting, my impression is someone needs to find a "killer app" for it.  I'm not clear whether enough charge could be collected from nanofibers to put a dent in a pacemaker's energy budget.  It will likely find applications that the reasearchers haven't even considered. 

Digital language translators are used every day. However, there is one dialect that still eludes the automation.

Engineering students, Ranjay Krishna, Seonwoo Lee and Si Ping Wang, from Cornell University are attempting to develop a very different type of translator, one that helps those who cannot make use of auditory signals. The students have created a sign language translator that converts hand gestures to their corresponding letter symbol and sound.

This translator is in the form of a glove for the hand and circuitry that fasten to the forearm. The glove itself contains nine flex sensors, four contact sensors, one x-y axis accelerometers and one z-axis accelerometer. The flex sensors are positioned around the upper/lower knuckles and the contact sensors at the tips of the fingers to distinguish between gestures. The accelerometers are needed because some letters vary only on movements of the hands and other letters vary only on the orientation of the hand.

An ATMega644 Microcontroller is used to analyze the signal from the electromechanical sensors and send transmission requests to the transmitter. The device is made wireless using a Radiotronix transceiver. All of this makes up what they call the Detection Unit, and it is simply strapped to the forearm.  The signal is then received by the base station with outputs the results to an LCD screen as well as transmits the signal to a computer via USB where it can also be outputted as sound through the computer speakers. The students used Matlab, Java and C for all their coding.

As far as can be seen, this device only converts gestures to letters so more development is needed for those gestures that represent nouns or actions but no doubt this is a start towards a world where we can all communicate a little easier.

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Microsoft has unveiled a revolutionary piece of kit that could transform the consumer electronic market over coming years. Using the new augmented reality system, consumers working in different locations would be able to collaborate on tabletop projects. The device, in essence, allows them to share objects that they can both handle.

The device, which is known as MirageTable, has been demonstrated at a conference in Austin, Texas. The firm also outlined details of the project on the firm's research site. The impressive system gives the illusion that the two parties are working together seamlessly. However, Microsoft researchers concede that even more work needs to be conducted before the kit can reach the consumer market.

Details of how the system works are provided on Microsoft's research site. The firm explained that using a 3D-video projector, consumers are able to beam images onto a sheet of curved white plastic. Thereafter, camera sensors are used to track the direction of each person's stare. They are also used to capture the shape and appearance of objects. And using shutter glasses, consumers are able to see the object in three dimensions, thereby rendering geographic boundaries obsolete for some people.

In a statement, the researchers said they were "motivated by a simple idea: can we enable the user to interact with 3D digital objects alongside real objects in the same physically realistic way and without wearing any additional trackers, gloves or gear".

Although the prospect of the MirageTable reaching the consumer market remains some way off, Microsoft researchers are optimistic about the future of the project.

"In our system, the user can hold a virtual object, move it, or knock it down, since all virtual and real objects participate in a real-world physics simulation," the research team said. "The unique benefit of this setup is that two users share not only the 3D image of each other, but also the tabletop task space in front of them."

However, the research team's positivity surrounding the project was tempered somewhat by the acknowledgement that simulating realistic grasping behaviours given depth camera input "remains an open research problem".